Digitization (Scanning, Indexing, Metadata) of 100 years of British Birds: the complete multimedia contents fully searchable on DVD-ROM
Our ePublishing client is a British company that produces videos, books and multimedia computer software for birdwatchers. The company offers up-to-the-minute news and views on British and Irish birds, comprehensive online and mobile reference, a huge photo library and the best products for birdwatchers everywhere.
The UK-based client's interactive DVD-ROM offers a whole bookcase of material on one disk. SunTec India has digitized and made searchable the entire contents of the journal for the last 100 years. The interactive journal is a treasure trove for all the followers of British ornithology. That's every article including photographs, illustrations and over 40,000 pages of text.
Highlights
Digitization of Journals: the content from the hard copies had to be scanned, indexed and converted into HTML format. The contents had to be made searchable to ensure that they are interactive, can be easily filtered and display articles, photographs and illustrations quickly.
Client requirements
To convert the textual content from hardcopies to an electronic format economically, the client approached SunTec Web Services, that has a proven expertise in data conversion jobs in an accurate and cost-effective manner. SunTec India has executed similar projects with success for some of the major publication houses, world government agencies and academic institutions.
Challenges
- Journals consisting of over 40,000 pages of text dated back to the year 1907 onwards. Majority of them were old and in a fragile condition.
- Due to the crumbling condition of the journals and to secure their preservation in hardcopy format, SunTec India was required to resort to manual scanning.
- Most of the journals included photographs and illustrations. These images had to be optimized for the web.
- We were also required to index the main headings from the chapters and all zoological terms for the bird for each of the journals.
- As the text had to be converted into HTML format we were supposed to apply web design specific style sheets.
- The entire digitization and conversion of the content required 99.99%.
Implementation
SunTec started with the manual scanning of the journals. We indexed the headings and zoological terms for birds. We optimized the photographs and illustrations, using latest PDF / Image compression software, which convert PDF, TIFF and JPEG files into compressed, Web-optimized and text-searchable PDF files. The benefits from PDF conversion and compression include greatly reduced storage requirements and substantially shorter download times.
Our experts worked on creating the metadata and index to enable the end-user to search, filter and display all the articles, photos and illustrations in ways not feasible with physical journals. This would allow:
- Text and image search with powerful filtering
- Instant access to a wealth of information including all the BBRC Rarities Reports
- Locate articles by species, author, photographer or descriptive terms
- Includes photographs and illustrations
- Interactive multimedia access to thousands of articles
- View the content in a number of ways – Full Screen, Split-Screen or Thumbnail mode
- Filter the information on display.
Impact
The digitization work done for the UK-based client made 100 years of printed volumes available on one single DVD-ROM. The journals are fully searchable by species, author, photographer, location, date etc. It also allows for filtering and display of all articles, photographs and illustrations.
SunTec met the challenge that has won it rave reviews from the client. We offer extensive content conversion solutions. We convert from any source to dynamic digital content. We convert unstructured data into a structured mark up format- HTML, SGML, XML. We can repurpose images and texts easily in common formats. We deliver converted data that meets the accuracy level of 99.995% and the tightest turnaround times.
We cater to various industries, be it publication houses, academic institutions, major corporations, government agencies. No matter how large or complex the project, we are your reliable source for all kinds of Data Capture / Data Entry / Data Conversion / Digitization projects.
How Can We Help You?
Please contact us at info@suntecindia.com for further details on how we can help you with our digitization services in converting your raw information to interactive content.
